Content descriptions

Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2019 May #1*Starred Review* Poet-essayist Hyde (Common as Air, 2010) celebrates forgetting as a force for creative potency, personal growth, and social justice, and in doing so reminds us of his talent for intellectual synthesis and his restless, contrarian spirit. The ancients, suggests Hyde, understood that memory and forgetting are mutually dependent; according to Plato, we spend our lives trying to recover that which we once knew, before birth. Nietzsche famously viewed amnesia as an unburdening from the weight of history. We, too, might recognize that "beneficent" forgetting, while not a substitute for forgiveness or an excuse to ignore past injustice, permits us to heal emotional wounds, repair damaged interpersonal relationships, and make meaningful art. We see this dynamic at work in post-conflict reconciliation processes and in friendships between crime victims and perpetrators. It is an essential ingredient in the patriotism that binds disparate populations. But Hyde's thesisâless a structured argument than an aggregation of loosely related anecdotes and observations, collected scrapbook-styleâtranscends simple polemic. Rather, in the way of Zen Buddhism, it's an invitation to forget our very selves so that we might finally see the universe clearly. And alongside all of the bright-burning erudition, there is a very moving personal angle: his mother's progressive dementia and the prospect of his own. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

Author Notes

Lewis Hyde is the author of Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art and The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, as well as a book of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love.